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Mercury's Wings: Exploring Modes of Communication in the Ancient World

Online ISBN:
9780199983414
Print ISBN:
9780195386844
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Mercury's Wings: Exploring Modes of Communication in the Ancient World

Richard J. A. Talbert,
Richard J. A. Talbert
William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Fred S. Naiden
Fred S. Naiden
Professor of History, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Published online:
22 June 2017
Published in print:
25 May 2017
Online ISBN:
9780199983414
Print ISBN:
9780195386844
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Mercury’s Wings: Exploring Modes of Communication in the Ancient World is the first volume of essays on ancient communications. The authors, who include Classicists, art historians, Assyriologists, and Egyptologists, take the broad view of communications as a vehicle, not just for the transmission of information, but also for the conduct of religion, commerce, and culture. Encompassed within this scope are varied purposes of communication such as propaganda and celebration, as well as profit and administration. Each chapter deals with either a communications network, a means or type of communication, or the special features of religious communication or communication in and among large empires. The spatial, temporal, and cultural boundaries of this volume take in the Near East as well as Greece and Rome, and cover a period of some 2,000 years, beginning in the second millennium bce and ending with the spread of Christianity during the last centuries of the Roman Empire in the West. In all, about one quarter of the chapters deal with the Near East, one quarter with Greece, one quarter with Greece and Rome together, and one quarter with the Roman Empire and its Persian and Indian rivals.

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